Surprisingly ok movie considering the main actors are dancers. I'm not being rude, I'm a dancer, and the fact is there aren't many who are good actors. The screenplay is quite good too, if a little obvious at times, with a lovely flower theme through the whole movie, apart from a lame moment near the end involving a tattoo... To be picky, there needed to be more character development with the two lead characters and their romance, I felt nothing when tragedy hit, because they had not been developed enough to be believable. A case of too much dancing and too little script.
Baryshnikov and Kent are so beautiful that it's easy to forgive any other flaws in their performance, but then I'm a sucker for looks. I give 10/10 for the actor who played Paolo, he evoked great sympathy for his character and so I was rooting for him, and thought he should have got the girl in the end.
However once again I am stunned by how BORING the choreography is. If you're a dancer, watch this film with a non-dancer and ask them what they thought of the dancing. Odds are they're bored with it. Makes you think. PLEASE can we stop doing steps that don't mean anything. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE classical ballet, it's a fantastic challenge and there's nothing better for strength and flexibility. But it's no wonder that audiences are declining when we keep choreographing steps that are meaningless and their only function is to look pretty.
(spoiler ahead) I mean check out the second half of act two of Giselle in this movie. Albrecht is supposed to be dancing to death - DYING. But the music is trilling away prettily and Albrecht treats us to all manner of lovely turns and jumps and gestures. I just don't buy it.
The fact is that true classical ballet like this (story ballet, big sets, loads of pretty costumes, love, tragedy, masses of meaningless steps, classical music) is an art form that is based on archaic court dances of a VERY past era of history that most countries are glad they got rid of. I honestly think ballets like this deserve to be filmed really, really well ONCE and then not done any more. Only dancers and balletomanes must enjoy this stuff. I simply can't believe that anyone who doesn't know about either classical music or classical dance could enjoy this.
If dance would wake up and start doing stuff that ordinary people could relate to, then it would attract more audiences. Instead, dancers keep doing what they've always done, and they moan about how hard it is to survive as an artist. I suppose that there is a certain self-righteous romance about being a starving artist, but I've been there and done that and I'm sick of it.
So I'm off to find a way to make dance more interesting and make more money, Bye now...
*whew* that soapbox feels higher than normal tonight...
Some dance technique notes... Quite impressed with the Wilis entrance hopping slowly in arabesque. Despite the fact that it's an awful step to make it look good, there must have been 30 of them all with perfectly matching legs and seemingly floating over the stage. I never realised Alessandra Ferri had such small feet, watch her en pointe, quite stubby, gives me hope!!! :) She has amazing jumps and incredibly flexible hips and lower back. Her grande jete en tournant, watch the second leg, it goes up to 135 degrees *in arabesque* as she lands! and her series of 4 or 5 grande jetes all in a row with only one step in between is incredible, she gets to a 180 degree split on every one. Count Baryshnikov's pirouettes - I think he does seven in one scene, and in the solo near the end pulls off a triple almost lazily. Incredible.
